Sometime later, a poor traveling couple and their baby girl came upon this deserted house. They saw the body in the birch-bark coffin, but made little of it. This was a normal custom for many Native Americans.
The husband lay down in the backroom to rest. His wife prepared the evening meal, her daughter slung at her side. She heard the sounds of breaking bones, chewing, and slurping. She knew instantly that her husband had been killed, undoubtedly by some supernatural presence related to the corpse. Hope lay in deception.
“Your daughter and I are going to the stream to get water for the broth,” she cried out as merrily as she could. “We’re coming right back.” She took the pail, left the house casually, and started running along the well-worn footpaths. She was a long way toward the nearest village when a furious howl came from the direction of the cabin.
She ran even faster through the dim woods. Her pursuer was coming. The next bestial vocable she heard was closer than the first; the vampire man was gaining. She threw off a scarf. In a little while, she heard it ripped to tatters. She threw off other pieces of clothing, and each time the same thing happened.
She saw the walls of a stockaded town and called out the traditional distress cry, hoping someone might hear it. Some women finishing their last chores took it up, not knowing what emergency was at hand. But the sounds were near. The young mother could hear panting.
She collapsed outside the village, fearing it was too late. But a party of young men burst from the gates. They hovered over her, glaring into the night, and they were armed. Even a vampire knew he was beat. A half-human voice howled from the thicket.
The next day the young mother told her tale, and a war band set out for the cabin. The body of the husband lay just as he had slept, but with a big hole in his side. Next to him in its coffin was the body of the hermit, fresh blood on its face. It was the most contented corpse they had ever seen.
The warriors pounded the vampire into pulp and piled logs about the house. Soon after they set the fire they could hear yipping and howling within. A big jackrabbit slipped out, dodged weapons, and dashed between the legs of warriors.This may or may not have been the vampire spirit, but if it was, he had learned his lesson from the Iroquois. They never heard of him again.
SUPER SERPENTS
The snake is a universal image: its emotionless gaze, its stony torpor, its earth-cool blood, its inexorable slithering, its coiling, enveloping kill. As a symbol, it has powerfully impressed the conscious and unconscious mind since people started to create their lore, art, and mythology. The snake permeates dreams, all over the world.
Snakes that appear in conflict with the powers associated with sun, air, and sky—birds, lightning gods—may be different from the giant ones that appear solo. This bird-versus-snake imagery is heavy all over the Americas, including among the Iroquois.
In art, mythology, and literature, almost any big slithery evokes a dragon. Legs, wings, and fire or not, the twain are often taken as one.
The Asian snake/dragon is usually a symbol of the earth force and intertwined with the power of fate. It is not meant to be confronted, any more than other indomitable natural forces like gravity or the wind. It’s best worked with. Despite the occasional variant tale, the Native American snake is more like the Asian one.
Although the pre-Christian Europeans’ view of the snake may have been more in keeping with the Asian and Native American version, the European snake/dragon we see most often in art and literature is something the hero, the representative of consciousness, needs to master, carve, or skewer. Monstrous and inimical to human society, the European dragon is often interpreted as a symbol of something terrifying within the human mind, possibly the bestial unconscious—or older societies, an earlier way of life, and even the Devil.
Bearing in mind that their folklore shows some influence from European Christians, the great snakes that populate New York legend have a bit of both continents in them. Suffice it to say that the lore of the Iroquoians seems to participate fully in this pan–Native American and global mythological cycle.
In the Iroquois site tradition of New York, there are great lake snakes, little lake snakes, shape-shifting mythological snake beings, and landscape energy snakes. In general, the bigger the snake, the better it is for human society. Let’s talk about a few of them.
The Welsh word for man is related to the Latin vir and sounds like “were.” A werewolf is a man-wolf. One class of Iroquoian snake beings are were-snakes, shape-shifting serpent fairies, an alternate race like the selkies (were-seals) of Scottish lore. They may be related in some form to something the Seneca called the Blue Lizard, a man-sized servant of the greater snakes.
Some of the time these were-snakes are in league with a gigantic lake monster. They lure people near it for a meal. In other scenarios, they are altered forms of the big critter. Many Iroquois supernaturals are size-shifters.
Sometimes they come to us as lovers. They look pretty slick in their human forms. Seductive, on-the-edge beings, what about them entrances us so? They’re a lot like the Lamia of European folklore and Keats’ famous poem. They’re like the Lorelei Jung talked about, figures of dangerous sexuality. They are sublime—psychologically threatening. They look too cool for us. Then they show an interest. One hangout session with one of them and you are lost—fey—spiritually taken by the fairies,
